Because George Bush had come of age during World War II and had served in that war, his attitudes toward the world and America’s involvement in it were shaped by that experience, by the isolationism that had preceded the war and allowed darker forces on two continents to move against their weaker neighbors, and by the need for collective security in the years following, as two new superpowers faced off in an atomic age. To many in the generation coming home after World War II, a generation that knew firsthand the tragedy of the war itself and the death of so many close friends, old-fashioned isolationism was no longer acceptable. And it was even less acceptable as the buffers that had formed the premise of American isolation in the past, our two great oceans, were turned into ponds by modern weaponry, intercontinental rockets with nuclear warheads, atomic submarines and other instruments of war into which high technology was blended for the purpose of mass destruction.
That particular background, his service in World War II in the navy even before he attended college and his instinct to resist overt aggression, had been of singular importance in Bush’s decision to mount a full-scale military mission some sixty-five hundred miles away to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. During that crisis, Bush had been the most hawkish member of his own administration, surprising a number of his closest advisers and the senior people in the Pentagon alike with his singular sense of purpose. To him what the Iraqi army had done was a replay of World War II, naked aggression of the strong against the weak, and that was intolerable. Besides, it potentially changed the balance of power in the oil world, and his roots were in the oil business. The decision not merely to block the Iraqis at the Saudi border, which everyone in the administration agreed with, but to turn back the seemingly huge and powerful Iraqi army from Kuwaiti soil was very much George Bush’s decision.
Among those less hawkish than he were the Joint Chiefs, who were not in any way quick to come up with plans to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Colin Powell, extremely cautious about any use of American troops, favored instead drawing a line around Saudi Arabia that the Iraqis would dare not cross. Still smarting from the Vietnam experience when the Joint Chiefs, in his words, had been docile in allowing the civilians to go to war without spelling out clear objectives, he had pushed his superiors to state quite precisely what it was they wanted to do and what price they were willing to pay. At a certain point his caution became something of an irritant. Finally Cheney went to him and said, “Colin, you’re chairman of the Joint Chiefs. You’re not secretary of state. You’re not the national security adviser anymore. And you’re not secretary of defense. So stick to military matters.”1
Bush was sixty-four years old when he took office, which meant that virtually all of his adult life had been spent in the shadow of the Cold War. It had not only shaped him, but like most internationalist Americans of his generation, it dovetailed with his personal view of the world. He had never doubted America’s role in securing the Western alliance and drawing a line against the constant Soviet pressures in central Europe. Others in his generation had been affected by the Vietnam War and had slowly migrated from hawk to dove. But Bush’s views on the subject remained quite hawkish. If he harbored any doubts about the nature of the American commitment in Vietnam and why it had failed, they remained a secret to most serious students of that subject. On the day that Lyndon Johnson, his presidency ravaged by the war, had left Washington to return to Texas in January 1969, one of the relatively small number of politicians who came out to see him was the young Republican congressman George Bush. The other Republicans of his generation tended to look down on Bush, during his rise through the ranks of his party, as the legatee of a class, not necessarily gifted, but hardworking and willing to take on jobs that others might scorn. His class, it was believed, might once have entitled him to a seat in the inner circle, but now left him, fingers holding on to the windowsill, eager to take whatever was handed him.
Over the years Bush had filled a number of relatively senior foreign policy posts: head of the CIA, ambassador to the United Nations, U.S. envoy to China. As vice president he had been actively involved in foreign policy, far more so than most men who had held that office. He did not merely attend the regular early-morning briefings from the top CIA people assigned to update him on events of the last twenty-four hours, he lovingly and enthusiastically read the cables themselves—a sure sign that he was a foreign policy junkie. In that, too, he was generational—someone who believed that the true instruments of power resided in foreign policy. That, however, would change at an accelerating rate during his presidency, for the disappearance of an adversarial superpower immediately devalued foreign policy issues. But to Bush, and to everyone whose political viewpoint he respected, foreign policy remained at the core of his job. You ran for the presidency because you wanted to play a part in determining the direction of the world.
Bush was aware of his own strengths and weaknesses, that he was better at one-on-one relationships than he was at dealing with abstract issues. His personal courtesies were already legendary when he entered office. Running for the presidency, the core of his support had been the thousands of people he had met over the years who had stayed on as personal friends—many of them fellow Yale alumni—and to whom he had written countless bread-and-butter notes. When asked once what the basis of his presidential candidacy would be, he had answered, “I’ve got a big family and lots of friends.” Or as the writer Richard Ben Cramer noted in his book on the 1988 election, Bush “was trying to become President by making friends, one by one, if need be.”2 The Bush Christmas card list was endless, thousands and thousands of cards, hand-addressed, a process that probably started the day after the holiday season ended. His politics were primarily personal, rather than driven by the impulse of ideas. He also represented the politics of a kind of old-fashioned attitude of class: We come from certain backgrounds, we went to certain schools, we survived certain common historic experiences, we believe in the nobility of service when service is required, we look at the world in much the same way, we agree on what is good and what is bad. Moreover, we don’t know many people who have done their homework and don’t agree with us on everything that really matters.
Bush as a presidential candidate was an imperfect and often uncomfortable hybrid of old, traditional Eastern Republican liberalism and the new Sun Belt conservatism. He had started life as a scion of the Eastern establishment, son of Prescott Bush, a good liberal Republican senator, an unusually well-credentialed man who had created his own considerable shadow: St. George’s School, superb athlete at Yale in three sports, captain in the artillery during World War I, early vice president of Brown Brothers, Harriman, the symbolic center of establishment finance in its day, member of the Yale Corporation, Connecticut head of the United Negro College Fund. Young George was quite properly raised as an upper-class son of Greenwich, Andover (chosen for him because it was considered more democratic than some of the East’s more snobbish prep schools), Yale (Skull and Bones, captain of the baseball team), and marriage to a handsome young woman who came from exactly the same class. After college he had moved to Texas to make his fortune in the oil fields, living first in West Texas and eventually moving to Houston. Yet even though he would eventually win a congressional seat from that state, he was never entirely accepted as a Texan. The imprint of the East was always on him: the force of his family upbringing, and those perfect, old-fashioned manners, which so impressed any number of his more senior sponsors within the Republican Party. Texans are supposed to be at least partially raw and unfinished, and there was nothing raw and unfinished about George Bush.
Many of his old-line WASP qualities were increasingly out-of-date in America by the sixties, but no place more so than in Texas with its almost self-conscious contemporary informality. Bush’s good manners were by Texas standards stiffness, and he could never pass as a real Texan. All hat and no cattle, John Connally had once said of him. He was also a Republican caught in the party’s momentous transition both ideologically and geographically. He could no longer be an old-fashioned New England moderate because that wing of the party was dying all around him, but he could never be a Sun Belt conservative either, for his past was hard to escape. In 1980 in the New Hampshire primary, Bob Dole, trying to make sure that Bush did not change his stripes, kept referring to him as “the Rockefeller candidate.” It would take another generation, and the rise of his son George W. as governor, before a Bush could be accepted as a true Texan.
Even so, Bush continually moved to the right on certain domestic issues, adapting gradually from the political codes and social attitudes of the class and culture into which he had been born to the class and culture that now surrounded him. It is not always easy to reinvent yourself, and for Bush, it was harder than most. He did not adjust to the changed political culture of Texas with complete success and was often more than a little uncomfortable and awkward with his new right-wing allies in both speeches made and positions taken. Sometimes Bush seemed to be caught between duty and ambition as well as between his past and his future. When his presidential ambitions had flowered, he had moved away from his roots, in the period just before the 1980 campaign resigning from both the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations—in a perfect Bush mode, for manners were always important—with, it was said by officials at both places, a small personal note requesting that his resignation not be made public.
Bush had been added to the Reagan ticket—and thus cleared for the big time—only at the last minute. The idea of a Reagan-Ford ticket (with Henry Kissinger in charge of foreign policy and Alan Greenspan in charge of economic policy) had thrilled and excited much of the media, but failed to entice Reagan himself, and at the last moment he had chosen Bush at the suggestion of his pollster, Richard Wirthlin, who had in the convention’s final moments said that Bush helped as much as anyone else. The conservatives, the true-blue Reagan people, were not happy. They had always regarded Bush with great skepticism. He was in every way different from them. Was there an Eastern elite entitlement there? some of them wondered. Bush had called Reagan’s fiscal policies voodoo economics during the primaries, a phrase that might as easily have come from a liberal economic critic like John Kenneth Galbraith. But after taking office as Reagan’s vice president, no one could have been more loyal than Bush; the good soldier, Bush accepted all vice-presidential obligations, no matter how odious or menial, without complaint. Even when he disagreed with a policy, his people were under orders never to show any daylight between what they felt and what the president was doing. There were to be no leaks. Still, total loyalist or not, the Reagan true believers always knew that he was not one of them and never would be. They did not have to give him a test to know that if they did, he would in some way fail it. They were, of course, right. He was not a true believer, and the changeover from the Reagan administration to the Bush administration in terms of the national security team was not insignificant. Given the centrist nature of American foreign policy over most of the postwar era, it was almost greater than the changeover from most Republican to most Democratic administrations, or vice versa. James Baker, for example, taking over at State, was delighted to get rid of some of the more conservative Reagan appointees. “Remember, this is not a friendly takeover,” he said as he cleaned house.3
Bush knew that he could not compete with Reagan in many ways, that their skills were completely different. But his interest in process, the long years in grade working his way carefully and cautiously up in the world of national security, and his interest in foreign policy, would serve him well in office. The irony was that the president and his most senior people had come to power in a period that was the exact opposite of what they had trained for. They had spent all those years preparing for the worst, the approach of doomsday, and readying themselves for a dangerous increase in tensions and aggressiveness on the part of the sworn adversary in Moscow. Instead, the sworn enemy had become, if not yet an ally and a candidate for membership in NATO, momentarily a friend. In those turbulent, unpredictable days, dangerous because this was the last gasp of a dark empire, and old adversaries are often most dangerous in their dying moments, Bush and his team seemed to have perfect pitch. They knew how far to go at each moment, how much to push for change, when to back off and let events take their own course, and when to nudge them forward. At one point as the Soviet empire was breaking up, James Baker told his closest aides that the only question left was whether it would be, in his words, “a crash or a soft landing.” Largely thanks to the skills of the different members of the Bush administration, it was a soft landing.
The post–Cold War era was another thing. There was no training for that at all, and what to act upon and what to let go by was much harder to measure, because few of the new trouble spots represented, in the truest sense, direct threats to the national security of the United States. The all-purpose directive that had defined American policy for forty years—all eyes on Moscow, with quick glimpses toward Beijing, Western democracies good, communist countries and satellites bad—had suddenly been pulled from the table. In the Cold War not only had international politics been relatively simple, if ever dangerous, but domestic political attitudes toward foreign policy had been equally uncomplicated. Any president who took a hard line against the communists was almost automatically guaranteed the support of most Americans, but challenges posed by the communists, which made for easy calls when they existed in the center of Europe, were quite different when they surfaced in the third world, as with the postcolonial struggle in Vietnam, where the threat of communism was blended with potent nationalism.
The dominant question in American presidential campaigns had in those days been who was best prepared to stand up to the Soviet dictator of the moment. Both parties assaulted the other on this issue, although the competition inevitably favored the Republicans, for they were, by their roots, the party of business, of true capitalism, and therefore virtually by birthright more fiercely anticommunist. The simplistic way in which they often viewed the world translated into an advantage in domestic politics, for they saw no gradations out there, and they left no doubts about what our foreign policy should be. By contrast, the Democrats might possibly have been tainted in the past by their more liberal origins and views and could even on occasion be accused of fellow-traveling. So the Cold War had favored the Republicans, and some of the leaders of the communist world seemed to understand that they had a freer hand in negotiating with Republicans than with Democrats because the Republicans were less likely to be on the defensive. “I like rightists,” Chairman Mao told Nixon at their first meeting, “. . . I am completely happy when these people of the right come to power.”4
Then, almost overnight, that era had not only ended with the collapse of communism, but the world became infinitely more complex. Long-repressed indigenous forces were released everywhere, and they were dangerous in their own right even if they did not fit the old-fashioned, tried-and-true test as a global Soviet threat. It was as if true north had been erased from the compasses of the men and women who had worked all their lives in national security. The domestic political reaction to the new forces at play in the world would also change; that which had once been a whole would now become very fragmented. The foreign policy crises faced by Washington would in part evolve from the newly gained freedom of certain midsize powers to cause mischief, countries whose ability to act on their own had until recently been limited by their powerful benefactors. It is doubtful that Iraq, for example, a Soviet client state that had benefited immeasurably from knowing how to play the angles of the American-Soviet competition, but also a nation held in check because of its sponsor’s caution, would have felt free to move against Kuwait during the height of the Cold War.
Other crises would stem from the implosion of poor, embryonic African countries stocked to the gills with B- and C-level modern weaponry, countries that were barely countries at all, and in which most civic institutions of government, save the army and the secret police, had effectively atrophied. The rise of nationalism, indeed tribalism, in several parts of the world and ethnic anger over arbitrary boundaries would cause the outbreak of bitter, unusually cruel fratricidal violence and, in time, masses of refugees flowing across international borders. These were “teacup wars,” as the writer and defense expert Les Gelb called them. The issues they presented evoked not so much any immediate question of American national security as a question of American goodness and generosity of spirit and a long-term view that the less killing there was, the safer the globe was for everyone. If military commitments were made, they tended to be seen by the Pentagon as values-driven commitments, not national security commitments.
No one knew the right answers to the questions presented by these crises, if indeed there were right answers. Sometimes it seemed as if all the answers were wrong. Rarely was the security of the United States in any direct or even indirect way threatened, and on such crises the Bush people—other than for the Gulf War, which was to the president a mirror example of Germany’s naked aggression in World War II or North Korea’s in June 1950—moved slowly and uncertainly. They could talk the talk about foreign policy in the New World Order, as the president called it. But they, like the bright young men about to challenge them in the 1992 presidential election and then to replace them in office, were not yet sure where the walk would lead them.
There were also new, vexing political problems for Bush and any potential successor. As the Soviet threat to the United States receded, so, too, did the political support for any kind of foreign policy issue that was not immediate in its import. A generation was coming of age in the Congress who cared less about foreign affairs, elected by a generation of voters who cared less, and reported on by a media that paid less attention. Thus at a time when low-risk, largely humanitarian involvement in different parts of the world might have been possible, the necessary domestic support for it was on the wane. The country, to be blunt, was more powerful and more influential than ever before, but it was looking inward. It was the most schizophrenic of nations, a monopoly superpower that did not want to be an imperial power, and whose soul, except in financial and economic matters, seemed to be more and more isolationist.